Podcast and Blog on the Same Page?

I've had this question thrown at me a few times, "I want to blog and I want to podcast. Should I have a separate website for both?" I'm not sure I have an answer, but after thinking about this I went back to "It's all about the listener."

To me, people reading a blog are reading the content. If you then put in a podcast post with notes like "Show 16 with Steve Smith." That breaks up the flow of text.

However if you put show notes that read "Today I spoke with Steve Smith of the blah blah blah company and he gave us his insights into (topic) and how he had overcome some of the common problems that people find in this field (etc,etc, etc). Then I don't think it would "break the flow" of a blog. It would be a blog with a "play" button. I don't think you would interrupt the blog, and I think the blog (and extra text ) would serve as "Google food" and possibly grow your podcast audience. Especially if after your blog post you put "click here to listen to the interview."

My other question would be, "Are you trying to get blog readers to do one thing, and podcast listeners to do something different? Then you need two sites. It does make it easy as a podcaster to say "Go to ___.com for all of our show notes, contact information, and blog. Instead of "Go to ___.com for our show notes and ___.net for our show notes (This is something I've done with the School of Podcasting podcast. It's a nightmare, and I will be merging the podcast with the business website later this year). You want to give listeners A (as in single) call to action. Having too many choices may intimidate listeners and readers.

Those are my thoughts straight out of my head. I would love your comments. Is there one answer? Does it depend? If so on what?

About The Author

My name is Dave Jackson I am an award-winning podcaster who has been podcasting since 2005.
I'm am a featured/keynote speaker at events, author of the book More Podcast Money, and I served as the Director of Podcasting for the New Media Expo.
I am best known for founding the School of Podcasting and help hundreds of podcasters launch successful podcasts

2 Comments

I do it on my website and Slice of SciFi does it on theirs very successfully. The key is that you get value from both but don’t need both to have value.

Slice of SciFi posts many news stories throughout the week. On the regular show, they then present just a couple of the articles and discuss them. They make sure to mention that what is on the show is just a small portion of all of the news on the website.

The big trick is to create the website so that both are presented well. They seem to have done that well. I haven’t so much and haven’t revisited it yet. I am starting to take steps to get closer to that.

I just through this out to the Today in Podcasting Crew. Rob said to put two feeds on your site (one for just the blog, and one – for iTunes – thats just the podcast). Paul mentioned a good point that feedburner only sends 10 episodes to iTunes, so if you blog alot, you may not have many episodes in iTunes.